Posts by bombastic bob 10903 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015
"a properly trained pilot at the controls"
THIS is the problem. The MAX was sold with the promise that existing 737 simulators could be used to qualify pilots for the new airframe. Given that special training is actually NECESSARY for the MCAS feature, the correct fix will probably include fixing the simulators, too...
Aggressive marketing campaign drives development into a direction it probably should NOT have gone. "Agile" perhaps?
the smelly stuff added to natural gas has more than just H2S in it but is a cocktail designed to be easily smelt, uniquely enough that people immediately think of natural gas leaks when it's smelled.
But yeah, smelly stuff added to CH4 to make it detectable by smell.
I think Methane Thiol [a 'poo stench'] is also in there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanethiol
But yeah pretty much any gaseous material containing sulphur is gonna stink.
I have an idea:
a) fed-ex all "real" devices to/from your destination endpoints
b) carry only what you need to have on a 'burn device'.
It's not hard (in most cases) to create a gmail (or other) mail address, then forward everything to it while you're away, and fix it back when you return.
And other than listening to music or watching movies on a plane [SD cards good for this], a smart phone isn't all that necessary.
Avoid the problem entirely by making yourself a VERY small "digital target".
Or you can have FUN with them by doing something like this:
1. use FreeBSD on your laptop
2. create a jail that TSA can log into. Make sure the passwords are pejorative towards them.
3. Make it log into a console, not a GUI, and pressing any ALT+F-key gets you a virtual console into the jail [I know how, I have done this, and it's not that difficult]. You can still SSH into the host from the jail...
4. When TSA has you power it up, he sees a classic login prompt on a text console. When he asks for user+password, give him the one that's pejorative to TSA. "What, that's my password!"
5. If they want 'root' password too, give them THAT one. A FreeBSD jail has a different security context, so root's password is not the same as the host's. Make THAT one pejorative towards them as well, or a profane term, or something similar.
Anyway, you give them what they want, just like they ask, and they shouldn't complain, but you're also protesting and pissing them off. Smile the entire time.
"The truth is that something caused this guy to get flagged."
this has NOT been established, by the way. Additional journalism might uncover any facts that prove 'getting flagged' but I don't think that evidence exists. Most likely won't be uncovered without a lawsuit of some kind.
I expect to see that lawsuit fairly soon.
yeah I think the Mueller probe and the current followup insanity is a good example of why "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" does NOT apply when aggressive federal agents attempt to force you into something _like_ a 'perjury trap'...
Maybe Trump will become more of an advocate of civil rights as a result? he's currently busy fixing other problems (illegal immigrant caravans and securing the southern border, etc.), but "taming" the TSA and (allegedly) aggressive airport customs inspections might be the next thing to tackle.
personally, I don't much like taking my belt off to walk through a metal detector at an airport, having to hold up my pants and waddle, and then lose them when I spread my arms to get scanned. You're welcome everyone, I am "the streak". It has gotten _SILLY_.
AC - you need to wean yourself off of 'fake news'.
Most likely this was a case of over-aggressive law enforcement. It happens sometimes. The fact that officers wouldn't let the guy contact his attorney says it all, I think. They had his passport, they knew he was a citizen, and (allegedly) making threats to intimidate is completely inappropriate. ACLU will have a field day with it, as they should.
<joke>Maybe he should've said "asylum"</joke>
"the trouble is MANY religious people aren't rational."
fixed it for ya. I agree with that. you can say the same thing when it comes to a 'secular religion' known as 'politica correctness'. Many similarities exist in the behavior of 'the followers' to religious fanatics of one kind or another.
So maybe the statement SHOULD read: "The trouble is religious fanatics aren't rational" - and that goes with the SJWs, PC-fascists, and militant lefties, too.
"Get it now?"
No. I don't 'get' anti-logic and manipulation. The Heritage Foundation is NOT guilty of "no ethics and multiple human rights breaches". I think you may be guilty of promoting 'fake news'.
But, your comment is well worth reading. It provides a window into what was probably motivating those thousand or so petition-signers at Google.
(so no desire to silence, just expressing my disagreement).
"Where I draw the line though is getting people sacked or beaten up, or deplatformed because they won't toe the line on the currently sanctioned group think."
ACK. These are tactics of FASCISTS. Not the other way around. Think 'brown shirts'. Who wants to live in an environment like THAT? The people making the accusations, it seems, are even guiltier of the SAME THING.
Getting closer to easter, there's this bible passage I know about. Apparently Jesus said it, something about removing the log from your own eye before removing the speck of sawdust from the other guy's eye. This is SO typical of hypocrites, to be guilty of doing something (say intolerance), then IMMEDIATELY spot "intolerance" in others they disagree with, and be all righteously indignant about it, getting on their soapbox and using every '-phobe' and '-ist' term they can recite, call for firings, picket people's houses, harass people in public, etc. - all while simultaneously being GUILTY of the SAME DAMN THING.
It's worth pointing out how a log and a spec of sawdust are made of the SAME MATERIAL.
And that ends my sermon - you're welcome!
Or, as Shakespeare might put it: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
"Fascism is all about totalitarian control."
Definition of fascism: a militant form of socialism that does government takeover of nearly all industry.
It's a form of totalitarianism, yeah.
Communism in its worst form is very much like it, except that ownership has been removed and substituted with a rude form of 'collectivism', managed by an 'elite' group of 'leaders'.
In both cases, a small oligarchy benefits, while the masses suffer under the thumb of mediocrity.
Funny how fascism and communism must be FORCED upon the masses, whereas freedom has a life of its own and typically "finds a way". It's human nature to be free. It's AGAINST human nature to be SOCIALIST or COMMUNIST.
"They do however put out false information, such as 'smoking isn't bad for you' and 'climate change isn't a thing'"
MAN MADE climate change isn't a thing [this would be accurate]. And I don't know where you got this information about their attitude towards smoking, but I expect it, too, has been taken out of context.
more 'fake news', yeah.
to whom do you direct this? I think the left NEVER allows differing opinions to be heard, by shouting them down, calling for firings and resignations, and being as disruptive as possible.
So I'll have to agree with you: NOT allowing different opinions to be heard, a favorite tactic of the left, is a VERY bad thing.
yeah that guy won't just be FIRED, he'll be BANNED, and BURNED AT THE STAKE! After all, he *DARED* to NOT swallow the LIBERAL COOLAID!
There is business, and there is politics. Too many people in business *FEEL* (not think) that they can use it to control other people's POLITICS, too, by use of threats, firings, "suggest you resign", or what-have-you.
Didn't the President of Mozilla have a SIMILAR situation, because his name was found on a list of contributors to pass a particular state proposition?
I think a giant clue-bat, and a BIG FAT LAWSUIT, is in order, for OUTRIGHT DISCRIMINATION!!!
"trigger word" indeed...
[isn't the whole idea of freedom and tolerance to NOT create a 'look over your shoulder' and 'chilling effect' environment for people who MIGHT have different opinions on things? The 'brown shirts' of Silicon Valley are AT IT AGAIN, and some of them apparently work at GOOGLE!]
I google'd and found pcworld and computerworld articles [appeared to be the same article] saying that RH was taking a more active role in CentOS. So probably, yeah.
This is probably like Microsoft assimilating github - I'll play "wait and see" before making any real judgements, but so far I'm not disappointed. I still have a lot on github. Not gonna stop using it any time soon.
And so with RH and I guess CentOS too, I suspect that nothing bad will happen any time soon. If anything it puts them in a position to become an alternative to Windows for _EVERYTHING_. I could see IBM doing that. Yep.
2.4 was used in a lot of wirless access points a decade or so ago. It was pretty tiny, fit inside a 4M flash on broadcom-based systems. I think OpenWRT started out with 2.6 as I recall, and a lot of Linksys routers used 2.6 rather than 2.4 at that time. But yeah, that was the last time I did anything with 2.4, on wifi routers, 10+ years ago.
2.4 had the advantage of being extremely stable, yeah, in operation as well as development. It wasn't "a moving target".
"Let's see what happens to RedHat's innovative drive - and revenue - once the standard IBM management techniques regarding (or better: disregarding) their human ressources kicks in."
yeah, "big company" H.R. is pretty bad in my opinion. Theyll start by having clueless mooks filtering all of the resumes for the right key words and tricky phrases (or something equally moronic) which is likely to filter out the best people in favor of those who know how to milk the system...
(yeah I have a pretty low opinion of H.R. droids)
What I wonder, however, is how the 'culture of IBM' will affect some of the things that SOME call "innovation" but _I_ call "in the way". You know, like:
a) systemd
b) wayland
etc.
I have a strong suspicion that IBM may use RH as a vehicle towards providing an alternative to Win-10-nic. One can only hope...
I once had chili for lunch at work, a big can of it, and sneaked a 'silent but deadly' one out an hour or two later, and a lady nearby [about 10 to 15 years older than me] smelled it and wondered what was cooking, "smells kinda good". I carefully avoided laughing...
(yes, this really happened)
normally my ass-gas clears the room. But, rarely, it will smell like what I ate.
the thing about LiPo and LiIon batteries is that they tend to wear out faster than NiMH (from my experience, anyway) although their weight is significantly lower.
That, and the tendency to catch on fire if you don't treat them right.
(Being surrounded by a vacuum might make LiPo/LiIon safer, though)
Lithium, next to hydrogen, is the most reactive material, and is the most reactive metal. And lithium batteries have a charge/discharge behavior curve that you need to be very careful with. Over-discharge them and they start outgassing, which greatly reduces their performance and life expectancy.
And for some reason, I never seem to get a typical LiPo or LiIon to last NEARLY as long as an NiMH battery can last. Laptop batteries in particular seem to fail more readily when they're lithium based, but I still have old NiMH batteries for old laptops that work just fine, even 15 year old batteries (with reduction in capacity, but still holding a charge). Go fig, yeah.
(worthy of note, I was deeply involved with charge cycles on a LiPo battery for a customer project a short while back, from charging circuits to undervolt protection and why I needed to design that in)
Anyway, lithium batteries are a bit overrated in that regard. But as it's only for another, maybe 5 or 6 years, I can see (because of weight alone) why NASA would swap in lithium batteries for NiMH.
sort of blocker: a plugin (like the 'cookie white list with buttons' plugin for firefox) that allows you to accept all cookies but put non-white-listed ones into memory only, not on disk. Then when you turn off cookie acceptance (and maybe right back on again), or close the browser, they go into the bit bucket.
For Firefox, there's a plugin (or was, I'm using version 56 still) of 'cookie white list with buttons' or similar title. In short, you can tell it to accept ALL cookies, as long as the button enables cookies. But only whitelisted cookies are stored on the hard drive. The rest go into 'write only memory' when you disable cookies or close the browser. Dumping all cookies is basically "turn it off, turn it back on again" [except for whilte-listed cookies, of course]. So it doesn't SOLVE the problem, but it sure keeps it under control.
In fact, if this were a standard browser feature (HINT HINT) to ONLY store non-white-list cookies IN MEMORY, and give users the ability to "dump all" or shut off their acceptance with a button or a menu option, it might actually solve 99% of the cookie tracking problems. In many cases you'd get those irritating "someone logged on to your account" e-mails but so what. The entire point is to eliminate the tracking, and flushing cookies periodically (yes, obvious reference to "the loo") would really screw them up. And what would happen if EVERYODY did it? they'd have to do something ELSE.
and 'tick boxes' on a permissions page would no longer matter. And, maybe the browser/plugin could prompt you with "do you want to store this cookie permanently" (with the options to block it [black list] or keep it in memory until you flush/exit [normal handling]) so you can see what they're up to and have some additional choice.
"OK and More Info"
like this: https://aqua-teen-hunger-force.fandom.com/wiki/Www.yzzerdd.com
(from the article's title, I'm glad to see at least SOME common sense in application of the law)
how about a tinfoil T shirt? (I suspect the antenna is in the chest, and not the head).
As for this: "with a range of roughly 25 feet without any signal boosting"
An extremely high gain antenna, low noise receiver, and higher than normal power transmitter, could [in theory] extend that range for MILES... (you'd probably need 40db gain, which is not impossible, but would be really really cool and innovative to 'get there')
[think sophisticated satellite communications equipment, and that's what I mean]
seems to me it's (once again) about H1B and importing cheaper "salt miners" that can be roped in and locked in and used to depress the average wages...
yeah, yeah, of course, Silly Valley and George Soros and others are behind it. We know. So typical.
If they want to TRULY reform immigration, they'd a) stop the "insane asylum" loopholes [bad pun I know], ONLY allow immigration based on MERIT [not a random lottery], and kick out all of the ILLEGAL immigrants. The LEGAL immigrants who are left will help to make America Great. Again.
but yeah that's not what THE DEMOCRAT meant. He wants an open/porous border so that "Big Contributors" can keep their wage costs down. So transparent...
If all they're doing is forking stuff, that's not "development' really. More like "re-branding".
I'd hope they'd at least have the intelligence to change the object names from "com.example.whatever" to something THEY own... and if they can do THAT much, they can ALSO modify the 'manifesto' to have the correct permissions in it.
well, like the title says, "when enough apps abuse it" - but not ALL app authors want to invade privacy. But too many apparently do, so that they can make something "free" and still monetize it.
Personally, I would like to post some free stuff in order to demonstrate my skills, "see I wrote that". Helps when getting new contracts, sometimes.
Don't forget, Apple has removed applications "they do not like" from their store. It's like censorship.
Apparently in 2017, an iOS application for use in China was removed because it helped users to get around 'the great firewall' - apps from the New York Times, no less - that's ONE example, many others exist. Doing a search shows that applications have been removed "for not being updated in a while". Come on, if you get it right the FIRST time, WHY does something need UPDATING? 'At a whim' may be an understatement.
And I really don't like it when "big data" or manufacturers start DELIBERATELY limiting what you can do with your OWN device...
I think on Android 8 you can individually control which applications have location ability... because I remember turning it OFF for one (a game/art application - yeah why did THAT need location data?), and the application complained. I suggested to the phone's owner that it be left OFF, "do not show this again" etc..
So there may be a way of dealing with it on newer phones, but 8 isn't the newest, so who knows any more...
stopping applications from doing things is good when you DO NOT WANT them to do it. but if the application needs access, and you don't blindly say "ok" to everything, then you lose whatever functionality you really wanted.
And that's the point.
It's YOUR phone, so YOU should be in charge of it.
"I guess you can still install apps from outside the playstore which can access these features"
Yes, and in some ways the 'new method' (individual approval of each application NOT certified by 'Google Play') is better than the old one (wildcard enabling of any application install from outside of 'Google Play') though I have had to jump through hoops a bit to get it to work so far.
But this might not be possible if the Android OS is updated to simply exclude ANYTHING that wants access to 'certain features' (from permission flags in the 'manifesto' let's say, similar to now) when those feature requests are on 'a list' and there's no cert or other 'permission mark' from the Play store's signage info to allow it....
I also don't know what affect this will have on any legacy home-brewed and locally signed APKs, which [for now] can be made available via a web page or be directly copied into the Android's file system via USB. Enterprise applications needing access "to everything" might STILL be possible, doing it this way. (edit: someone else calls this 'side loading' I guess; not a term I'd used before, might have seen it, didn't stick)
Google is (wishful thinking?) *trying* to protect end-users from themselves, without becoming TOO much like Apple with _THEIR_ store (bans because "Apple just don't like it"). Well, I hope so. And apparently it's a reaction to rogue applications. No surprise, but little excuse for THIS kind of "solution".
Google could offer a better method, using something similar to 'Firebase' for authorization keys (let's say) that are verified at install time from the Google Play store. That's not ideal, but at least it would help to control the "rogue" behavior by adding some extra 'permission steps' and not outright BANNING functionality.
And, it COULD get worse... they could become 'Apple'. Or even MORE like them.
For some reason it reminds me of Firefox making changes from 56 to 57...
I think Google is becoming more like Apple with their store. But as long as I can install "any APK" so long as I enable that on the device, it's less of a problem. It's just that the user will be prompted with a "scare message" during the install.
Android's sandbox for user applications is a bit irritating, more so NOW. A more 'open' platform would be much easier to work with, but then would expose users to being duped and spied upon. However, when you have to go through the list of applications on someone's phone (friend, relative, BYOD) and specifically DENY access to the phone's location (or in this case, SMS and call logs) for a GAME or ART application, which has NOTHING to do with the capability they claim to "need", then it's kind of obvious why Google did this.
I don't like it because it sets a precedent, requires "permission" to do what you've been doing all along, etc.. I thought the 'permissions' stuff in the 'manifesto' was supposed to take care of this, make sure the end-user knows what the application is trying to, etc. but apparently NOT any more...
Conclusion: Google things users are REALLY STUPID now, just like Apple.
worst case scenario: the boss does it
a) prototype device being tested at the last minute, several engineers doing hands on stuff on a weekend or late at night
b) no other device available for the test except for that one prototype (i.e. no spare). And we're gonna fix the firmware problems as we find 'em.
c) The test required comparison of 2 devices, though, one of which had 5V power, the other 3.3v power. And both had the same shaped power plug, and only one could be plugged in at a time.
d) after an hour or two of tests, the boss plugs 5V into the 3.3v unit, which had no voltage regulator. we all went home. Yes, we saw the blue smoke. No, we couldn't put it back.
normally, the kinds of specialized diagnostic equipment that you would need to rework a laptop motherboard (as an example) make it impractical to repair them on-premise.
Most likely they'll swap the motherboard, then send your old one back to be repaired or analyzed for why it failed by techs that have the right equipment.
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